What is an EIP address?

Last Updated: Nov 21, 2017

An Elastic IP (EIP) address is a public IP address resource that you can purchase and possess independently. Currently, you can bind an EIP address to a VPC ECS instance.

An EIP address is a type of NAT IP address. It is located in a public network gateway of Alibaba Cloud, and is mapped to the private network interface card (NIC) of the bound ECS instance in the way of NAT. Therefore, the ECS instance bound with the EIP address can communicate with the Internet without disclosing the EIP address on the NIC.

EIP address features

Independently purchased and possessed

You can purchase an EIP address as an independent resource instead of purchasing it together with other computing or storage resources.

Flexible binding

You can bind an EIP address to an ECS instance in any VPC as needed to make the instance accessible to the Internet, and release it whenever the Internet communication is not needed.

Configurable network capabilities

You can adjust the bandwidth of an EIP address as needed. The bandwidth change takes effect immediately.

Differences between an EIP address and an ECS public IP address

The following table lists the differences between an EIP address and an ECS public IP address.